Do not Track

1-Like Mining: This video explains how can your likes and activities on Facebook and other social media platforms could be used by several parties to make money. What I found informative about this video is that a user’s data could not be just revealed to these companies, but also very deeply analyzed to interpret behavior, even better than humans would do it (as claimed by the video). An interesting part in this video was when a financial company CEO stated that he can use social media activities to assess the reliability of customers in returning loans. This leaves me with a question: Does that suggest the possibility of having people manipulating their accounts (or even creating fake ones) in a manner that would guarantee their loans?!

2-The Spy in my pocket: This video shows how cell phones are used in making target ads through location tracking. The speaker shows that she has 50 applications on her phone, 37 of which requires her location in order to function. These applications would collect the users’ data, track their movement and send targeted ads based on where they are, places that they go to frequently, and places they have been to before. The weird fact that I learned from this video is that even flashlights has access to where users are through UDID, which is an identity number specific to each phone in the world. Data related to the UDID would be then collected and sent to tons of advertising companies who would use them to bombard the users’ feed with products.